Soulful stuff

We all need to revive our enthusiasm, feel peace, remember happiness and have moments of transcendence. When I encounter something that gives me a taste of these things, I will share it with you. These are not my photos and I’m not claiming ownership. They just made me feel better when I saw them.

This is such a lovely thing all by itself, but it also struck me as a great way to describe what a dramatic spiritual awakening feels like inside you. The joy and relief at the end of separation and the opening of a completely new, unexpected and deeper relationship to life.

Science is a Gas Giant.

I don’t mean anything disparaging by that. It’s a mental model to freshen up our thinking.

The unequivocal territory of science is the sum of theories plus experiments that have unambiguous, replicable results. This body of knowledge is the diamond-hard core at the heart of science. There are a lot of physics and chemistry experiments here. They seem to know their parts by heart.

Just beyond the border of that core, the gas atmosphere begins but it is nearly as hard as the core itself. It’s a long, dense gradient from here to the wispy edge of the atmosphere that is literally made of thin clouds under scattered atoms and space. Close to the core, the experiments are as replicable as the day is long when you average them out. There are enough squishy, stochastic details here that any random experiment might say something new, but not useful. The ambiguous results are overwhelmed by un-ambiguous ones like a single black grain in a bag of white rice.*

Heading outward, the variables faced by theorists get more complicated and slippery. If the questions science aims to answer were pickle jars, we’d crack them open without a beat at the core, struggle with rubber gloves and screwdrivers around the middle, and create thought experiments about jars and pickles at the foggy upper edge. Your thought experiment may perfectly predict opening the jar, and what’s inside but it’ll be a long time before anyone gets a pickle. Continue reading →